Until recently, delivery of paper tickets by travel companies to their customers was the norm when booking a trip. However, travel companies and particularly airlines companies, in an attempt to reduce their operating expenses in an extremely competitive business environment, have started ‘delivering’ electronic ticket or E-ticket instead. This dematerialized form of airline ticket is rapidly replacing the traditional paper tickets. Once a reservation is made, an E-ticket thus exists only as a digital record in the computers of the corresponding airline company or in the computers of a global distribution system (GDS), such as AMADEUS, a world-wide service provider for the travel industry and airline companies. E-ticket is thus a paperless electronic document, a file in a computer, used to represent the purchase of a seat on an aircraft airline, traditionally through a travel agency and also through a website or by telephone. It generally just takes the form of a confirmation number assigned to the passenger, along with the flight number(s), date(s), departure location(s), and destination location(s) of his/her trip. Among many alternate possibilities, this essential travel information can be: printed, e-mailed, forwarded to a mobile device or added to the passenger personal digital assistant calendar application. Hence, when checking in at the airport, passenger has simply to present positive identification to get a boarding pass and have his/her luggage checked.
An example of a state-of-the-art E-ticketing computerized travel system environment, of the kind put in place by GDS's and other travel providers, is shown in FIG. 1. In this environment, E-ticket (115) is created on the basis of information provided to a first computer platform (125) by the passenger desiring to make a reservation. Information must include all necessary flight details to complete reservation such as the travel dates, boarding points, flying class and so on, along with the passenger name and address, the form of payment, etc. Passenger reservation (110) is generally referred to as the passenger name record or PNR. All PNR's controlled by a reservation system (125) are held in at least one appropriate database (130). Such a reservation system is traditionally accessed by a travel agent on behalf of a travel agency customer. The advent of the Internet and of its ubiquitous application: the World Wide Web or Web, has however promoted a direct access to reservation systems by end-users of various online travel applications (OLTA). End-users can then book themselves a flight or a complete trip through online travel service providers such as: Opodo®, Expedia® and Travelocity®. In both cases travel information necessary to create PNR is provided from some sort of client travel software applications either run from a travel agency, by a travel agent on behalf of a customer, or from end-users that typically use Web browsers on their personal computers (120) to access an online travel service application of their choice.
In the state-of-the-art computing environment depicted in FIG. 1, once completed, PNR (110) triggers the creation of a corresponding E-ticket (115) on a separate system, i.e.: an electronic ticketing server or ETS (140). Communications between the various components, i.e.: the reservation platform (125), the electronic ticketing server (140) and the end-users or travel agencies (120) are achieved with traditional means and protocols through a mix of public and private networks (155) including the GDS private network(s) and the Internet. Then, E-ticket is stored in a dedicated database (150) under the control of ETS from where it can be retrieved to be consulted when necessary by the travel agent who has issued the PNR or by the end-user of the corresponding online travel application and, in any case, when passenger checks in at the airport.
In the general case of a reservation (110) there are more than one flight segment per PNR. Each of them is then associated (112) with a corresponding coupon when E-ticket (115) is created. However, once E-ticket is created, any change done on the flight details of the reservation does not automatically trigger a corresponding change of the electronic ticket. Indeed, there is currently no automatic process to complete this task. Hence, E-ticket must also be manually updated. If passenger has requested the assistance of a professional in a travel agency it is up to the travel agent to update manually the E-ticket with the requested changes (160). Otherwise, the document and the reservation become de-synchronized, and the segment and its corresponding coupon are orphan, i.e. segment is no longer associated with a coupon (170). De-synchronization thus always requires costly human intervention and can adversely impair check in and boarding, thus greatly offsetting the advantage of having implemented E-ticketing.
The changes done in the reservation can be requested by the passenger. These are voluntary changes, as opposed to involuntary changes initiated by the airline or travel agent. Involuntary changes are for example the result of a flight cancellation or of schedule changes. Depending on what commercial policy they apply, airlines and travel providers may require charging penalties for voluntary changes according to a set of predefined calculation rules. The generation of penalties must also be triggered manually prior to the updating of the E-ticket. Moreover, because this is not mandatory, if the travel agent does not launch the corresponding process, the airline will not collect any fee for the reservation change thus impacting airline revenues.
In a very competitive business environment the main corporate objective of all airlines and travel providers is indeed to reduce their operational costs to stay profitable. To this end, electronic ticketing, which is far less costly, is a prime contributor to achieve it provided it can be thoroughly carried out without impairment.
It is therefore an overall objective of the invention to have all passengers travel ready at check in time in spite of the changes they may have done to their travel plans, thus requiring no or few human interventions at that critical time while enabling an automatic collection of the change fees when applicable.
It is also a specific objective of the invention to overcome the lack of automatic synchronization between E-tickets and PNR's here above discussed.
Further objects, features and advantages of the present invention will become apparent to the ones skilled in the art upon examination of the following description in reference to the accompanying drawings. It is intended that any additional advantages be incorporated herein.